This blog is about The Big Picture - information and insights about what goes on in the world outside our borders - and what it means for Americans. Unless otherwise specified, all photos from Deena Stryker archive.

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Project Exodus

The Syrian civil war has revealed inconsistencies in US foreign policy that cannot be attributed to ignorance or incompetence.Following the never-to-be-truly-elucidated September 11th attacks in New York, the US appears to have ‘foolishly’ taken on ‘nation-building’ in no fewer than four countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and….Ukraine, with Syria still up for grabs.

During that same period, the US has gifted the developed world with a major economic meltdown that had the seemingly unintended consequence of discombobulating a previously flourishing European Union. One thing that can be said about the latter, as well as about Iraq, Libya and Syria, is that these political entities are located on the left-hand side of the ideological spectrum, along with Iran, that found itself victim of all but paralyzing Western sanctions for years under the pretext of its atomic energy program. It so happens that Iran, Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah constitute a ‘frontline’ of support for the Palestinian cause, with Iran accused of seeking to destroy the Jewish state while this latter has recently been known to make overtures to the most ‘right-wing’ Arab state, Saudi Arabia.

Considered in isolation, these ‘facts’ are at the very least disconcerting. Do they suggest an insoluble conundrum, or does their apparent lack of coherence point to a picture whose ‘size’ renders it imperceptible to geo-political analysts accustomed to dealing with minutiae?

It is no secret that the military/industrial/financial complex whose nerve center is located in Washington is determined to secure the raw materials that will enable it to successfully extend its remit to the entire earth. (And that is why it seeks every excuse to isolate and eventually defeat Russia, with its vast mineral wealth (see Zbig Brzezinski’s 1997 The Grand Chessboard). But that is only the tip of the ‘iceberg’ - or more accurately,the ‘cauldron’.

By now it will have escaped nobody’s attention that humans are destroying the branch upon which they are sitting: the planet earth. As oil companies continue to obfuscate the truth and earnest activists pursue an all-but hopeless campaign to save Mother Earth, the 1% makes plans to save its members. In forums such as the Bilderberg Conference the discussion undoubtedly focuses on how the elite can first, maintain itself on a dying Earth, then colonize another planet. High-level research into space colonization has been going on for years, as ‘government’ and private sector players frantically pursue the identification of a planet capable of supporting human life. Ever more powerful spacecraft are being developed, including by the private sector, which has put out a call for volunteers ready to leave earth forever.

Given this context, what would logically be the attitude of ‘governments’ toward the world’s ever expanding population? Can we assume that Mars, or some as-yet unidentified rock out there will accommodate nine billion people? Calls for volunteers being in the double digits, not billions, what can be our only logical conclusion? I submit that it is: “The 1% is not going to worry about the 99%.”

The lovely science of austerity has already made the point. It is spelled out in Surplus American: How the 1% is Making Us Redundantby Charles Derber and Yale R. Magrass If you think my imagination is working overtime, watch Neill Bloomkamp’s Elysium, in which two classes of people exist: the very wealthy, who live on a pristine man-made space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live in overpopulated, Earth favelas. Already in the seventies, Soylent Green described a world in which the only food is made of humanely killed citizens. Just as the early French futurist Jules Verne imagined Around the World in Eighty Days in 1873, our cinematographers show us the much bleaker future that technology is spinning for us.

In the interim, between the time when we realize that nothing our brilliant minds can conjure up will save the planet from becoming inhospitable to humans, and the onset of the climate catastrophe (assuming we manage to avoid nuclear war), the fly in the ointment of benign neglect has been the existence of the European Union, that has managed to channel the respective needs of over thirty nationalities into a political entity that provides the highest standard of living ever achieved by humans. Its five hundred million people cannot be allowed to stand as an inspiration to the rest of humanity: it must be destroyed via austerity, Margaret Thatcher’s resounding ‘There is no Alternative’ pointing the way.

As resistance to this project inevitably grows, the 1% must increasingly turn to fascist methods of control, from listening to our conversations and reading our emails to the militarization of local police forces. (In Soylent Green, food is distributed by heavily armed police, and in Elysium, they play the role of labor overseers…) Hitler perfected fascism in the name of Lebensraum for the German people - room to live. His methods are being updated for The Survival of the Fittest.

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Welcome to Otherjones!

The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

This blog aims to prepare my readers in ways more important than stockpiling food and bandages for whatever happens, as we transition from an American century to a world century, helping them see through the web of lies with which we are being controlled.

Having lived for years at a time in half a dozen ‘foreign’, countries — learning their languages and histories — I have a unique ability to identify events that bear watching. That life, however, could not provide ‘retirement benefits’, so if you appreciate the unique combination of information and insight that characterizes my work, I hope you will integrate a small donation to Otherjones into your budget.

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P.S. I encourage you to review the archive. You will find many posts from recent years still relevant today.

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If You Had Been Watching....

One of the worst aspects of the US media landscape is its neglect of what goes on in the rest of the world. When I returned from nineteen years of living in France, where I sometimes watched CNN’s excellent coverage of world events, I was surprised that in the US, CNN offered nothing comparable. I called the main editorial office in New York and was told ’Americans aren’t interested in foreign affairs’, revealing one one the reasons why the US government gets away with wreaking havoc around the world: Americans have no information that would prompt them to protest their county’s actions abroad.

The fact is that several countries’ governments — aside from the British — fund international television channels. These include France 24, NHK (Japan) , Al-Jazeera (Qatar) RT (Russia) and Telesur (Latin America). These channels usually broadcast in English, Spanish and Arabic, using native speakers, enabling most people in most parts of the world to hear news that their national outlets do not cover and get a broad window onto the world.

Meanwhile, Americans are told that the channel that is most significant for them, RT, is propaganda!

RT is significant not only because, like the other foreign channels it offers a wide range of programs but because it includes opinions from many well-known Americans who are barred from our own mainstream media.

From time to time I will signal significant news stories covered by these foreign channels that are absent from our own.